Educational Science

Earliest Evidence of Our Human Ancestors Outside of Africa Found

Our ancient human relatives got around more than scientists previously thought. Researchers in China excavated stone tools that were likely made by our human ancestors some 2.12 million years ago — the earliest evidence ever discovered of the human lineage outside of Africa. It suggests a way earlier migration out...

Could Evolution Ever Bring Back the Dinosaurs?

Did you watch the 1993 movie blockbuster Jurassic Park and wonder, Could this happen for real? Could the dinosaurs ever come back? The idea that these mighty creatures could wander our Earth again some day is for most humans both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. Even real-life scientists are...

In a toxic urban landscape of the future, what strange (and still oddly familiar) animals might have evolved to survive there? A new book, Beyond the Sixth Extinction: A Post-Apocalyptic Pop-Up (Candlewick Press) by Shawn Sheehy, artfully imagines the grotesque creatures that could live in a possible future — one...

How Did Opium Poppies Get Their Painkilling Properties?

Humans have been turning to the poppy plant to get high or relieve pain for thousands of years. And despite all our other staggering pharmaceutical progress, our reliance on the plant hasn't changed much; poppies are used to make two of the world's most widely used painkillers, morphine and codeine,...

Neanderthals and Humans Were Hooking Up Way More Than Anyone Thought

Way more sex happened between Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans across Europe and Asia than scientists originally thought, a new study finds. Scientists initially thought that interbreeding among the two groups was more isolated to a particular place and time — specifically, when they encountered each other in...

Humans Are Eating Most of Earth's Largest Animals to Extinction

It's hard to argue that the world is not made more interesting by singing whales the size of school buses, dinosaur-footed bird monsters that can leap clean over your head or slimy, cannibal salamanders that grow as large as crocodiles. Giant animals like these are known as megafauna. Beyond being...

Ancient Human Ancestors Had to Deal with Climbing Toddlers

More than 3 million years ago, our adult human ancestors were walking on two feet and didn't have the option of a fashionable baby sling to carry their kids around in. Instead, Australopithecus afarensis toddlers had a special grasping toe that helped them hold on to their mothers and escape...

Brain of Mysterious 'Little Foot' Human Relative Was Half-Man, Half-Ape

The brain of one of the oldest Australopithecus individuals ever found was a little bit ape-like and a little bit human. In a new study, researchers scanned the interior of a very rare, nearly complete skull of this ancient hominin ancestor. Hominins include modern and extinct humans and all their...

How smart were Neanderthals?

When geologist William King introduced a new species of human, Homo neanderthalensis, to the European scientific community in 1864, he wasn't very generous toward our extinct evolutionary cousins. I feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a...

Neanderthals' Big Noses Get an Airy Explanation

In the human family tree, Neanderthals are our closest extinct relatives, and they looked a lot like modern humans. But one defining difference was a distinctive skull shape, with the middle part of their faces pushed forward dramatically — far more so than in their human cousins. Scientists have argued...